Just A Bit Of A Rant About Employment

I’ve just received confirmation that all staff will be expected back in the office, on full working hours, from the 8th of March. I guess it’s back to 90 minute, traffic hell, commutes to and from work and skipping lunch breaks because of the extra pressure to perform that being in the office brings with it. 

Now I’ve got used to it and adjusted my body clock to account for it, losing those 3 hours from my day and my 30 minute workouts over lunch are really going to hit both my mental and physical health hard. 

So much for the pandemic permanently changing office work for the better, it seems far more likely to me that it’s going to change it for the worse.

If you don’t want to read the rantings of a perpetually working class, over opinionated, generation rent, aging millennial (yes, I am currently wearing skinny jeans… fucking zoomer.) I’d suggest you stop here… Otherwise, have at it.

I might not be a business analyst, but I’ve worked in industry for a long time and have weathered many a storm and remained relatively unscathed whilst doing so. This is thanks to being quite technically minded, trying my best to be an “information sponge”, having a reasonable level of insight into how things work and being a good judge of things to come. As I see it, thanks to business closures, caused by a mixture of the government mismanaging both the pandemic and brexit, it’s going to give the surviving employers greater scope to work their employees harder than ever. Surviving employers are going to want to take advantage of diminished competition to expand their market share and claw back lost revenue, but they’re going to want to do it without increasing costs because of the long term uncertainty that brexit has caused. 

This is likely to lead to them relying on a mixture of expendable “zero hour” contracted agency staff and expecting their existing full time work forces to increase productivity. A decrease in the amount of competition for employers generally leads to an increase in the amount of competition for employees, essentially a hell of a lot more people are now competing for a hell of a lot less jobs. Couple this with the fact that there’s now a massive influx of very talented, very experienced individuals who are currently unemployed and will be looking to start a new job ASAP and you have a situation where previously indispensable, relatively well paid, staff are now fairly easily replaced by equally capable people who are willing to accept lower pay out of desperation.

The foreseeable future is looking bleak from an employee standard point. The glass ceiling is going to be lowered, expanded and reinforced. Anyone below it will find themselves pushed into a more cramped, more competitive, higher stress environment. They will find themselves working harder and longer hours for the same or lower rates of pay. People at the lower end of the scale will find themselves suffering from stress caused by poor work/life balance, job insecurity and financial strains.

People above the glass ceiling will almost certainly experience the opposite of this, widening the gap between rich and poor. Basically because it’s been made harder for low level workers to break through, competition for high level jobs will decrease and therefore high level job security will increase. Meanwhile lower levels of business competition and an increased level of productivity to fill this void, whilst working to keep costs as low as possible though pressure on the workforce, is likely to create higher profits and therefore higher pay or bonuses to those upper echelons. 

Needless to say our current conservative government will be working hard in the background to ensure that this is the case, slowly chipping away at employee rights whilst firming up the control an employer can exert over their staff. As is generally the case with conservative policies, this will help to strengthen the stranglehold that large business concerns have over the economy, making it ever harder for smaller, independent businesses to compete on any level.

Basically if you’re already rich, and you’ve weathered the covid storm, you’re going to be doing great. If you’re poor, you’re basically screwed and as long as you continue to work, spend, repeat, whilst you’re capable at least, the government couldn’t give a damn if you sink or swim, live or die.

Ok, rant over… I’m perpetually tired and my bones hurt.

A While Ago This Image Came Up On My Tumblr Dash...

A while ago this image came up on my Tumblr dash and, being currently somewhat dissatisfied with my employment/general living situation, I ended up going off on a bit of a self indulgent rant. I re-read it this morning and came to the conclusion that it's a perfectly valid opinion, though it doesn't contain any information that most people aren't already aware of, so I've decided to post it on here too:

There's a fairly simple explanation, traditionally as people get older they get richer. Conservative values and policies generally benefit the rich, so the older people get the more they benefit from being conservative. That is not happening with this generation, largely thanks to conservative values and policies, the financial landscape has changed. Rates of pay at the lower end of the job market have stagnated, the majority of employers are no longer interested in their employees happiness and general well being, as they’re seen as an easily replaceable commodity. Meanwhile, house prices, and housing costs in general, have risen at way beyond the rate of inflation, meaning that many young people can no longer afford to get on the housing market and are forced into the rental trap. Couple this with rises in the general cost of living and it's gotten harder, and continues to get harder, for normal, working class, people to make and retain money. Basically we're poor, we’re getting to a stage in our lives where we should be seeing our hard work pay off, but we're not and as such conservative values and policies do not benefit us in anyway and are, more than likely, only making things worse.

Job Search

I’ve been in my current role for so long that I’d almost completely forgotten how hard it can be to find a new job. The stupid thing is that it’s not even that there’s no jobs out there, it’s more the fact that it seems like no matter where you look none of the jobs available are roles that you’re qualified to do, that fall within your skill set or are aimed at your current level of experience.

You either end up applying for nothing at all or for a ton of jobs that you know you don’t stand a chance of getting. Either way even just trawling through job sites is mentally and emotionally draining, and that’s before you even get to filling out the absolutely ridiculous application forms or spending hours tailoring your C.V. and crafting a well thought out cover letter, all the time knowing that you’re unlikely to even receive a “thanks, but no thanks”.

To me the thing that makes matters worse is that about 80% of the jobs you apply for are through employment agencies, meaning you don’t even know if your application is getting passed on to the company or not. The only thing that you do know for certain is that for the next 6 months you’ll be getting constant phone calls, generally while you’re at work and unable to answer them, trying to get you to apply for any position in a 50 mile radius, even though you expressly stated that you’re not wanting to commute any more than 5 miles, that has a remotely, often extremely remotely, similar job description to your current role.

Being an adult sucks.